Tips for minimizing data transfer costs

There are a few things to keep in mind when considering waste reduction with data transfer. The first involves data transfer out to the internet. We saw that data transfer can go directly from EC2 instances out to the internet, or that you can leverage CloudFront to serve content to your users.

Using CloudFront offers several advantages. First, while both CloudFront and traditional data transfer out are charged on a per-GB basis, you’ll see cost savings by using Amazon CloudFront because CloudFront doesn’t charge for origin fetch operations. Origin fetch is the process of retrieving content from an origin, like an EC2 instance. When the origin is an AWS service such as EC2, there is no data transfer charge between those AWS services and CloudFront. Moreover, the volume discount of data transfer out from CloudFront to the internet is greater than the rate from EC2 to the internet. So, for data transfer at scale, CloudFront will...